44. The Brawl

I try to steer clear of straight-out politics in these meditations in Pandemic times. But I can’t completely ignore last night’s event, which was advertised as a debate. 

Coronavirus is on the rise in many places here and abroad. Over 44,000 cases and 970 deaths in the country yesterday, and even here, in Wallowa County, we’ve had four new cases in the last week, pushing us past 30. 

We don’t know if the African-American attorney general in Georgia presented evidence against the two policemen who actually shot Breonna Taylor. We know that most of the protest in Portland has been peaceful; and we know that the Proud Boys and others on the right have showed up with weapons, but we don’t know if some of the left-side protestors are willing or eager to be violent. 

We know that fires devastated some small towns and many families in the Willamette Valley, and that California is still burning. And we watch the hurricanes and floods on TV. 

In the middle of all this, of fire, peaceful protest and violence, unresolved police on Black killing, and the uneven spread of Covid-19 across Indian reservations and Black and Latinx communities, in the middle of all this we get a brawl.

I winced as Trump stormed, Biden smirked, and Chris Wallace tried to wrest control of it. A friend I watched it with said it was the World Wrestling Federation; Amy Walters said on Public Radio this morning that it was more like a middle school food fight.

I wasn’t surprised by Trump’s attacks and talking over Biden and Wallace. I wish Biden had stayed stone-faced for more of it, and let Wallace handle more of the president’s rages on his own. He did himself no good in calling Trump a “clown.”

In the end, I felt dirty, like I’d been in a mud-wrestling match or snuck into a dark-alley porn show. And I couldn’t help but see Senator Joe McCarthy’s flushed face in Trump’s, couldn’t not hear the threat of communists and homosexuals in our midst. 

And I waited for Joseph Welch, the Army counsel in the McCarthy hearings, to speak up: “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

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